Book Image

Maximizing Tableau Server

By : Patrick Sarsfield, Brandi Locker
Book Image

Maximizing Tableau Server

By: Patrick Sarsfield, Brandi Locker

Overview of this book

Tableau Server is a business intelligence application that provides a centralized location to store, edit, share, and collaborate on content, such as dashboards and curated data sources. This book gets you up and running with Tableau Server to help you increase end-user engagement for your published work as well as reduce or eliminate redundant tasks. You’ll explore Tableau Server's structure and how to get started by connecting, publishing content, and navigating the software interface. Next, you’ll learn when and how to update the settings of your content at various levels to best utilize Tableau Server’s features. You’ll understand how to interact with the Tableau Server interface to locate, sort, filter, manage and customize content. Later, the book shows you how to leverage other valuable features that enable you and your audience to share, download, and interact with content on Tableau Server. As you progress, you’ll cover principles to increase the performance of your published content. All along, the book shows you how to navigate, interact with, and use Tableau Server with the help of engaging examples and best practices shared by recognized Tableau professionals. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to use Tableau Server to manage content, automate tasks, and increase end-user engagement.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau Server
4
Section 2: Navigating and Customizing the Tableau Server Interface
8
Section 3: Managing Content on Tableau Server
12
Section 4: Final Thoughts

Where to find data for personal projects

One of the most challenging aspects of getting started when building a Tableau Public portfolio is finding data to use in your analysis. The good news is that there is a wealth of data out there – you just have to know where to look.

The following are some of our favorite places to find data sources:

  • Community data initiatives: Initiatives such as #RWFD, as discussed in the previous section.
  • data.world: Create a free community account to access 100,000+ open datasets.
  • kaggle.com: Create a free account to access open datasets in a variety of formats.
  • Wikipedia: Use this site to compile data sources or find tables of existing data. Note that tables of data copied from a web browser and pasted into a spreadsheet may contain hidden characters and present formatting and cleanup challenges.
  • catalog.data.gov: An extensive catalog of open data available in multiple formats from the US government.
  • data.census.gov...